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The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking The History Of The Old West

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Sturart Udall, the author of this history, served four tems as a Congressman from Arizona. He served eight years as the Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He is also, as this book shows, a thougthful student of the history of the American West. He combines a breadth of study with a personal touch and with stories from the experience of his family in the West that adds to the eloquence of his book.

"The Forgotten Founders" covers a great deal of terrain in a brief compass. Udall's goal is to show the importance of individual settlers in establishing the American West. Udall writes (p.37):

"A shortcoming of histories that concentrate on broad outlines of events is the absence of human faces and stories of ordinary folk that would reveal what animated individuals and families and indicate the experiences they had. Yet only by considering individual human experience can we begin to develop a sense of what these men and women faced and an idea of the magnitude of their achievements."

Udall's approach has a distincly Jeffersonian cast in emphasizing the role of small yeoman farmers to an independent citizenry. He discusses and quotes Thomas Jefferson to good effect (p. 135). Jefferson said:

"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds."

Udall also emphasizes the importance of religion as a motivating and civilizing force in the West's early development. He focuses poignantly upon the experience of his own ancestors, early adherents of the Mormon Church and influential in the development of the Mormon Church in Utah. His discussion culminates in a lengthy and forthright discussion of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. John D. Lee, Udall's great-grandfather was instrumental in this unhappy event and was executed in 1875 for his role in the massacre.

Udall gives substantial attention to Catholic and Protestant efforts as well. He correctly points out that in a secular age, many people tend to denigrate the importance of religion as a motivating factor for people. The settlers of the West did not share some of the modern skepticism and cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the importance of religion to their lives. I was reminded particularly of Willa Cather's "Death Comes to the Archbishop." Udall discusses Cather (p 187) but might have considered her picture of Catholicism in the West in more detail as it supports his argument.

In emphasizing the role of the small settler and of religion, Udall downplays the role of explorers such as Lewis and Clark and fur traders. He also tends to denigrate the role of the California gold rush of 1849 as having a lasting impact on Western development. He criticizes and downplays the importance of capitalist development of the West in mining, grazing and other large-scale activities following the Civil War. He is critical of the U.S. Military's efforts in "pacifying" the Indians. He also debunks popular sterotypes of the West that Hollywood and popular culture has fashioned elevating characters such as Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp to a legendary status.

Udall has important things to say about the human and environmental costs of the gold rush and of the mining and grazing industries. In particular, he points repeatedly to the mistreatment of the American Indians and also to the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in the early history of the West. But at times he seems to me to confuse his point that Western development, in terms of the gold rush and the development of capitalism, say, had deleterious effects on the West's development with the point that they had no role to play in this development at all. This latter position appears to be overstated, even on the evidence of Udall's book. Udall also gives too little attention to the integration of the efforts of the settlers with the efforts of the capitalists, the gold-rushers, and the Army. These parties may have been working with related goals and not separately as Udall too often assumes.

Professor David Emmons of the University of Montana has written a fine introduction to Udall's book. Professor Emmons's own book, "The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925" figures prominently in Udall's discussion (p. 157) of alternatives to the development of the profit-obsessed company mining town which various communities in the West were able to use on occasion.

This is a good study which is valuable in its emphasis on the efforts of individuals and on the importance of religion to the settlement of the West. It is an introduction to this important area of American history.

A good book and well worth the read. The author does indeed speak of some of those forgotten pioneeers who were so important to the westward movement. It is understandable, as he clearly discusses him Mormon roots, but it seemed at times as though the book could well have been entitled, "How the Mormons Won the West." The Mormons were indeed an important factor, and
for the most part, did act responsibly in settling the West. I thought, however, they perhaps were given an overly large role in the book. He does, at times, let some of his liberalism creep into his writing. Nonetheless, a good read and I will look for other writings by the author.

A good history of the founding of the west. I liked that the author dispelled the many myths of the old west, largely perpetrated by Hollywood; however, his tone often sounded a bit pleading. The author had ancestors who settled the west, and he seemed desperate at times for his readers to understand how specious Hollywood's portrayals are; it was almost off-putting at times.

Having said that, the book was otherwise well-written, and the above criticism applied to a minority of the book, so I'd still recommend it.

The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking The History Of The Old West
By Steve Udall.

Midway through The Forgotten Founders appears a sentence that aptly summarizes the the work as a whole: "The real story of the settlement of the West was work, not conquest" (83). According to Steve Udall, the Wild West of popular perception is a falsehood; it's most important figures were not mountain men and trappers, gunmen and cowboys, or 49ers in search of gold. These men lived on the periphery. At the core were those resolute souls who spent their days struggling to bring the West into the domain of American civilization. It was these pioneers who immigrated to the Western frontier, staying there, breaking sod and forming towns that "founded" the West.

This contention provides Udall with many subjects to excoriate, an activity Udall sets about with some delight. The California gold rush is described as one of the most "hare-brained ventures" in history (132). Politicians in the East speaking of Manifest Destiny were but "windbags" and "indolent speculators" (115). The army (and her generals) primary role was to "author atrocities" (176). Trappers, explorers, and gunslingers, are flippantly dismissed as "transitive outliers" (6).

With the familiar caricatures of the dirty miners, stoic sheriffs, and daring outlaws gone, who is left to populate the West of our imaginations? If they are but romance, where can we find reality? Udall points to two groups - the religious leaders and missions of the early West, and the pioneer families who followed in their wake.

Udall's illustrates this point in a very personal way. A decedent of such "founding" pioneers, Udall sketches a life history of both his and his wife's great-grand parents to reveal the day-to-day process by which the West was won. I found this section of the book to be one of the most interesting -- the eight individuals presented range from William Maxwell, the founder of a dozen towns across the West, to Jacon Hamblin, a famous "peacemaker" between Native American tribes and Mormons, to John Wesley Powell, an early scientist, geologist, and explorer of the West. While each of these vignettes presents lives as diverse as the West could provided, their stories are woven together through the central theme of settlement and toil.

There was another facet that united Udall's ancestors: religion. All were members of the Mormon faith, and their stories show this. William Maxwell would not have been scrambling around the West building towns if the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City had not been telling him to do so. Understandably, Udall maintains that religious communities and leaders were the backbone of the American West. This argument is expanded beyond the Mormon theocracy: Udall documents the important function Franciscan Friars played in California, Reverend Jason Lee and his role in promoting settlement in Oregon, and Catholic missionary Evsebio Kinor, Arizona's "founding father."

Most of these names are unfamiliar to Americans - but this is exactly Udall's point. We have replaced the true heroes of the Old West with the likes of Butch Cassidy and Billy the Kid. Udall's case has its limits (the independence of Texas, for example, was quite undeniably the work of the adventurers and scalawags that have no place in Udall's Old West), but in general it is sound. The Old West was the domain of communal endeavors, not unbridled individualism. It was a land conquered by the plow, not by the gun. The stories of the men and women who made their lives in Western vales and plains may be prosaic, but they are the story of the West itself. The Forgotten Founders does a fine job of reminding us of this easily forgotten reality.